Path: utzoo!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!apple!epimass!jbuck From: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: C news: file ownership and running build 47386 times Message-ID: <3738@epimass.EPI.COM> Date: 22 Nov 89 23:32:52 GMT References: <3054@splut.conmicro.com> <1989Nov20.183239.1809@utzoo.uucp> Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA Lines: 30 In article gnb@bby.oz (Gregory N. Bond) writes: >>Henry, have you considered using lwall's configure suite? In article <1989Nov20.183239.1809@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: >Yes. We're not impressed by the way it crashes and burns on systems that >are BSD/SysV hybrids, especially since many modern systems are such. It >has this ingrained notion that the world is divided into 4BSD and System V >and your system *must* be one or the other. I can only conclude that you haven't used the Configure scripts Larry is producing these days (as opposed to rn, which, after all, came out in 1984) and that you haven't seen metaconfig, since it most emphatically doesn't do that. Generally, I have pretty good results with Configure on a Masscomp, which is a hybrid system. The generated scripts don't assume a library function is there because it's a Sys V; it runs nm on the C library and finds the routine. For known nonportabilities that affect the program operation, a test program is generated. There is some leftover cruft that goes back to the days when Larry was making some of the mistakes you're talking about. And it's far from perfect; the test to decide whether a system has terminfo as opposed to termcap fails on Ultrix systems, for example. But your main criticism is no longer valid, and Larry continually takes feedback and improves the system. -- -- Joe Buck, just visiting/consulting at Entropic -- write me at: jbuck@janus.berkeley.edu ...!{uunet,ucbvax}!janus.berkeley.edu!jbuck